“Money was the life blood of Najaf.” Thus observed the Shi[ayn]i author, [ayn]Ali Khaqani.1The story of the Oudh Bequest, which channeled more than 6 million rupees from the Shi[ayn]i kingdom of Awadh2in India to the two Shi[ayn]i shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala[ham] in Iraq during the second half of the 19th century is a fine example of Khaqani's assessment. These [ayn]Ataba¯t-i [ayn]a¯liya¯t (“sublime thresholds”) were the most important centers of learning in Shi[ayn]ism during the 19th century. For this reason, a study of the bequest provides important insights into the internal workings of a leading community of ulama during a period of change, as well as into the role of European players in the life of such communities.

Reports emanating from Yemen as early as the 1920s indicated that local Jews were subjected to a unique statute, known in Jewish sources as the “Orphans' Decree.” This law obligated the Yemeni (Zaydi) state to take custody of dhimmi children who had been orphaned, usually of both parents, and to raise them as Muslims. The statute, anchored in 18th-century Zaydi legal interpretations and put into practice at the end of that century, has no parallel in other countries.1 S. D. Goitein suggests that the legal basis for this religious interpretation rested on the hadith: “Every person is born to the natural religion [Islam], and only his parents make a Jew or a Christian out of him” (Muhammad al-Bukhari 82, 3).2

This study aims to examine the way in which European writers of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries represented Ottoman government. The Ottoman Empire had a special place in European experience and thought. The Ottomans were geographically close to Western Europe, yet they were quite apart in culture and religion, a combination that triggered interest in Turkish affairs.1 Particularly important were political affairs. The Ottoman government inspired a variety of opinions among European travelers and thinkers. During the 18th century, the Ottomans lost their image as formidable and eventually ceased to provoke curiosity in the European public. They were no longer dreaded as the “public calamity”; nor were they greatly respected as the “most modern government” on earth. Rather, they were regarded as a dull and backward sort of people. From the 16th century to the 19th century, the European observers employed two similar, yet different, concepts to characterize the government of the Ottoman Empire. The concept of tyranny was widely used during the 16th and 17th centuries, whereas the concept of despotism was used to depict the regime of the Ottomans in the 18th century. The transition from the term “tyranny” to that of “despotism” in the 18th century indicates a radical change in the European images of the Ottoman Empire. Although both of these terms designate corrupt and perverse regimes in Western political thought, a distinction was made between tyranny and despotism, and it mattered crucially which term was applied to the Ottoman state. European observers of the empire gave special meanings to these key concepts over time. “Tyranny” allowed for both positive and negative features, whereas “despotism” had no redeeming features. Early modern Europeans emphasized both admirable and frightening aspects of Ottoman greatness. On the other hand, the concept of despotism was redefined as inherently Oriental in the 18th century and employed to depict the corruption and backwardness of the Ottoman government. This transformation was profoundly reflected in the beliefs of Europeans about the East. That is, 18th century thought on Ottoman politics contains a Eurocentric analysis of Oriental despotism that is absent from the discussions of Ottoman tyranny in earlier centuries.

The Price Revolution of the 16th century has been the subject of one of the most enduring debates in European historiography and, more recently, in the historiography of the world economy. That European prices, expressed in grams of silver, increased by more than 100 percent—and in some countries, by more than 200 percent—from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 17th century has been well established and broadly accepted. In countries that experienced currency debasements, overall inflation was proportionately higher, reaching, in some cases, 600 percent or more for the entire period.

This article attempts to make a contribution to the intellectual history of the early Turkish Republic through an examination of Kadro, a monthly journal of political, economic, and social ideas, which was published in Turkey between 1932 and 1934.1 The Kadro movement took its name from the journal Kadro; the journal aspired to fulfill two self-appointed tasks: to develop an ideological framework in which to interpret the Turkish revolution that had created the republican regime led by President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk,2 and to suggest economic policies that, in accordance with this ideological framework, the regime should pursue in the future. Although Kadro clearly identified itself with the republican regime, and although its publication was sanctioned and encouraged by leaders of the Kemalist regime (the same political leadership that eventually forced Kadro to cease publication), it was not a simple emanation of the government or of the ruling Republican People's Party (RPP). Most of the journal's regular writers had “leftist” backgrounds that had, on occasion, brought them into collision with the republican authorities. Kadro's political loyalty to the regime was never in question, but within these limits, it exhibited a striking degree of intellectual independence.

David Ayalon died in June 1998 after a scholarly career of well over half a century, during which he molded the historiography of the Mamluk sultanate, to say nothing of Mamluk studies generally. Throughout his career, he remained an unabashedly old-school empiricist, poring over Arabic narrative sources to recover the elusive realities of the Mamluk sultanate and earlier Islamic polities. His output consisted principally of lengthy, unassailably scholarly articles, each a model of painstaking source criticism and meticulous argumentation. As a result of those articles, we know the structures of the Mamluk sultanate's armies; the true nature of the Mamluk sultanate's relationship to the Mongols; the uses of banishment in the Mamluk sultanate; the place of Circassians in the sultanate; and the overall history of the mamlu¯k, or military slave, institution, to list but a few of the many key topics on which his research shed light—more often than not, the first rays of light. Surprisingly, Ayalon produced only two books before his death: L'esclavage du mamelouk (Israel Oriental Society, 1951) and Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom: A Challenge to Medieval Society (Frank Cass, 1978). Nevertheless, his English-language articles alone easily fill four Variorum reprints volumes, with many to spare.

Though Sir William Jones's captivating English version of a ghazal of Hafez, first published in 1771, inspired many translators in the final years of the 18th and early years of the 19th century, none succeeded in producing a living, breathing body of Hafez's work in English. Goethe, of course, lavished his admiration on Hafez in the West–Östliche Divan, and Ralph Waldo Emerson echoed and amplified this praise in America with a number of English translations of von Hammer-Purgstall's German renditions of Hafez. All this attention from trend- and style-setting literary figures did Hafez the favor of creating an interest in and a ready market for translations of his poems. At the same time, however, it burdened him with a literary reputation the expectations of which were difficult for translators to meet. Once FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, perhaps the most successful English verse translation in history, demonstrated the possibility of creating a native English idiom for a poet such as Khayyam, readers' expectations for Hafez only intensified. Though a score of translators have tried their hand at Hafez, none has managed anything more than a satisfactory result.

The historical study of women and gender in the Middle East and Islamic world has come of age. Not so long ago, it was difficult to find good monographs or collections of essays on women's experiences in the past, even as studies of women and gender in the contemporary Islamic world proliferated. As a result, our ability to make sense of women's lives and experiences in the late 20th century suffered from a lack of historical perspective. An enormous amount of work still confronts us in recovering women's experiences, but exciting historical studies, solidly grounded in primary sources, are already changing the way we think about women in Islamic and Middle Eastern history—and, indeed, in some cases they are changing the way we look at that history as a whole. The greatest gains have occurred in the study of the 19th and 20th centuries, when changes in women's lives were particularly visible and the wealth of sources has allowed us to deal with a range of important questions. What we know about women in the early modern period, especially in the Ottoman Empire, is also expanding rapidly. The absence of work and the huge gaps in our knowledge of earlier periods, despite important works such as those by Denise Spellberg and Leila Ahmed, remains a serious problem, however. This collection of essays, Women in the Medieval Islamic World, edited by Gavin Hambly, is therefore a very welcome addition to the literature on the history of Muslim women in the pre-modern era.

Baber Johansen is perhaps the most original scholar currently working in the field of classical Islamic—predominantly Hanafi—law. It is useful therefore to have fifteen of his articles, not all of which were easily accessible, collected in a single volume, together with a new Introduction. The themes that emerge in the Introduction serve to highlight some of the leitmotifs that occur in the articles that follow. In it, he sketches the development of fiqh as a discrete branch of Islamic learning and outlines some of the characteristic Western approaches to its study. The theme of fiqh as a development independent of theology and formal ethical literature is one that occurs in several of the articles that follow. In “Die sündige gesunde Amme,” Johansen discusses in detail how the systematic reasoning of the jurists and the principle of judging according to only external appearances often led to a sharp distinction between religious ethics and legal rulings. This distinction is also the subject of “Le jugement comme preuve: preuve juridique et verité religieuse dans le droit islamique hanéfite.” Here, he shows how in Hanafi law only what is externally apparent is acceptable as evidence, and how legal proof depends on a formal procedure that recognizes a fixed hierarchy in the different forms of testimony. A consequence of this procedural formalism was that judgments could be unjust but nevertheless valid in law. The injustices that this distinction between legal and ethical norms could on occasion produce was something that the fuqaha¯ acknowledged. However, although a judgment could not be reversed, the aggrieved party could bring a new case with new evidence if a court's decision appeared unjust.

Hassan Khalilieh's work presents a broad survey of Islamic maritime law from the 9th through the 13th century. As a survey, the treatment is general and introductory; nevertheless, any reader with an interest in Islamic maritime law or medieval maritime law and practice in the Mediterranean will find this book an invaluable reference. Khalilieh argues that the Qur[ham]an, sunna, and fiqh sources from the 1st and 2nd centuries (hijra) are generally silent on the rules of seafaring. In some of the primary documentary sources of that period, one can find the beginnings of what would become Islamic naval supremacy in the Mediterranean. But to understand the laws of seafaring, one should look to fatawa collections and legal texts of the 9th to 13th centuries.

This work is the result of a survey done in 1969 prior to the breakup of united Pakistan into Pakistan and Bangladesh. The author conducted the survey among groups he categorizes as ulama, East Pakistani professionals, and West Pakistani professionals. The questionnaire and the results are included in appendixes.

With nearly a half-century of intermittent civil war in the background, it is becoming impossible to write a social-science monograph about Sudan without referring to contested national, ethnic, and religious identities. Few such works are gendered, however, and perhaps even fewer attempt a class analysis. Sudanese scholars contend more successfully with class; Euroamericans with gender. Despite good intentions, Sudan is usually explored through the binary model of “north” and “south.” Ann Lesch is no exception, but her ability to complicate matters is a welcome addition to the “integration–segregation” or “unionist–separatist” literature on Sudan.

Hisham Nazer, chairman of the Nazer Group of Saudi Arabia, former minister of planning, former minister of petroleum, and chairman of Saudi Aramco, has written a powerful and provocative book. In this highly original tour de force, Nazer analyzes the deleterious effects of the technological globalization of information on the cultural integrity of Third World nations and sets forth a strategy of resistance for the developing world. The work is directed at intellectuals in these countries, whom he challenges to “not just exist in this world; [but to] create our own world.” Rejecting the narrow definition of culture as “object-focused” acts and artifacts, he argues that culture should be understood as “the collective and dynamically active perspectives of living individuals.”

Pressures to lift economic sanctions against Iraq and Iran make studies of such sanctions, along with other restraints on investment and commerce, welcome additions to the political-economy literature. Uri Bialer's book is a diplomatic history of the effects of the Arab League boycott on Israeli oil supplies and the countermeasures Israel took to overcome them. The story he tells is powerful, and it has made me rethink carefully my former position on economic sanctions. This highly sympathetic consideration of Israel's difficult situation under sanctions reveals the extent to which desperation lowers inhibitions against actions that might have been disdained by policy-makers facing happier choices. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that this story shows that even when sanctions are operationally effective, they rarely achieve the strategic goals the initiators had in mind; indeed, sanctions are more likely to work at crosspurposes to those goals.

Much has been written about Jerusalem since the Madrid peace conference in 1991, most of it by partisans on both sides. Sir Martin Gilbert's work is one of the most entertaining, but least objective. Gilbert is a fellow of Merton College, Oxford University, and a biographer of Sir Winston Churchill and historian of World War II. He begins where his earlier volume, Jerusalem: Rebirth of a City, ended—around the turn of the 20th century. He starts his story with the last few years of Ottoman rule; dwells on British rule (1917–48) and the 1948 war; skims over the years between 1948 and 1967, especially the Jordanian rule of East Jerusalem; then gives a long account of the years after 1967. He ends his book with an endorsement of a plan to return part of East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. Gilbert is a master of the art of compressing an enormous amount of materials about the city's social, architectural, cultural, religious, and political history during the past century into a compelling and readable narrative. His book thus provides a panoramic account of the city, and, because he relies on newspapers, it has an eyewitness quality to it.

The Israel connection whose impact on American Jews David Mittelberg examines is that engendered by a visit to Israel by an American Jew, not that of any special relationship between the nation-state of Israel and of the United States. The book's conclusions, then, are not offered with an eye toward Israeli or American foreign policy. Instead, they are offered as a possible contribution to those “formulating strategies and allocating resources which will have an impact on Jewish education and community survival” (p. 2) in the United States. Mittelberg advises those engaged in such activities that the survival of an American Jewish identity requires not only a religious component, but also an ethnic one based in a Jewish community. Moreover, that community “must choose to exist not mainly for the sake of philanthropic, social welfare, and political activities, but as an end unto itself [whose] boundaries include all of Jewish history and Jewish peoplehood” (p. 133).

Martin Sicker's book is an account of the emergence of Jewish nationalism centered on Palestine during the century prior to the establishment of the British Mandate. It is a tertiary source, written mostly on the basis of published secondary sources. Hence, it offers no new material or interpretations for specialists to consider. The text is clean, unencumbered by a surfeit of notes, and it is easy to grasp. The major audience, in addition to students, would appear to be policy-makers and public-affairs professionals who need a concisely presented and easily digestible historical background study.

In a modest but original contribution to the literature on the Islamist movement in the West Bank and Gaza, Andrea Nüsse explores the ideology of the key player in this movement: Hamas. Nüsse analyzes Hamas's system of thought, particularly how it frames its struggle against Israel; the arguments it employs to oppose the peace process; and its use of Qur[ham]anic exegeses to underpin its militant, or jihadist, stance. The author avoids such issues as the structure of the organization and the social base of its constituency, which have been explored elsewhere. Instead, she relies on primary material to address the goals, strategy, ideological foundations, self-image, and perceived enemies of the movement. In addition to these themes, the author presents Hamas's perspective on contemporary historical events and developments, including the Gulf War of 1990–91, the mass deportation of Islamists to South Lebanon in 1992, and the Hebron massacre of 1994. The aim throughout the book is to shed light on an under-studied aspect of the movement, leaving it up to the reader to seek out other writings that give a more comprehensive analysis.

It is testimony to the sad state of the study of economics in the Middle East that a work such as The Political Economy of Middle East Peace: The Impact of Competing Trade Agendas, edited by J. W. Wright, Jr., could be produced. This collection of essays attempts to shed light on the relationship between international economic relations and the peace process. The sloppy scholarship included in this volume would be inexcusable when looking at any other region, but it appears to be acceptable when analyzing Middle Eastern economies. Although this description is not characteristic of all of the essays in the volume, it diminishes the overall quality of this work to such a degree that it detracts from the some of the more enlightening and important papers that are included. For example, Laura Drake's careful examination of “A New Middle East Order” in the first chapter lays out the potential stumbling blocks and hurdles as the process of normalization between Arab states and Israel continues. Unfortunately, the next chapter, by Wright, primarily examines the same topic but almost completely ignores relevant data and scholarship critical to his thesis. While some chapters examine key issues and analyze nuances in the political economy of the Middle East peace process, this uneven and incongruous group of essays is of little value to policy-makers, academics, or students of Middle Eastern political economy.

The fifteen-year civil war in Lebanon and its destructive social effects have called for soul-searching by many Lebanese. Hassan Diab explores the regional and international economic developments that caused political instability and led to episodes of civil strife and social upheaval in Lebanon from the late Ottoman period until recent times. Further, Diab promises to assess the revival of Beirut's past through the governmental project of Rafiq Hariri known as Horizon 2000, and the ramifications of reconstructing downtown Beirut in the aftermath of the civil war. Diab raises a number of legitimate concerns about the validity and necessity of these projects and the extent to which they can prevent the eruption of a civil war in the future.